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<\/a><\/div>\nThis week, The King and I<\/a> blog (which is doing a guided reading through the whole King James Bible in a year) finished the Pentateuch<\/a>. I\u2019ve been keeping up with the readings, and I\u2019m often struck by the strong contrasts between the passages in the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels and\u00a0epistles\u00a0I hear weekly at Sunday Masses.<\/p>\n In the Gospels, Jesus speaks in parables, using specific examples to teach higher, more abstract lessons. \u00a0Most of the parables end using more general and universal language, which makes it clear the story is not about proper agricultural\u00a0practice, but about the disposition of your soul.<\/p>\n As far as I can tell (from my amateurs grasp of bible history) the laws set down in the Torah are narrowly tailored and do not teach moral lessons. \u00a0Laws are bizarrely specific or seem ungrounded (see almost all of Jewish dietary law) and there\u2019s little in the text that suggests that they should be taken as metaphor.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve ever read Socrates\u2019s dialogue with Euthyphro<\/a>, you may be familiar with Socrates\u2019s famous question to Euthyphro. \u00a0After Euthyphro defines piety as \u2018that which is pleasing to the gods,\u2019 Socrates asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious or whether is it pious because it is loved by the gods. \u00a0Reading the Hebrew Bible, it frequently seems like the Good is Good only because God says so. \u00a0There is nothing good in it for its own sake.<\/p>\n The best example of this phenomenon so far comes from Deuteronomy 25:11-12<\/a>:<\/p>\n When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In case you\u2019re baffled by the language, these two verses explain that if a woman is caught\u00a0helping\u00a0her husband win a fight by grabbing his opponent\u2019s genital, her hand should be cut off without remorse.<\/p>\n Why is this law included in the part of the Hebrew scripture allegedly written by Moses himself? \u00a0It seems unlikely that wives were interfering in fights by groping their husbands assailants so frequently<\/em>\u00a0that this prohibition and its consequences deserved a spot in the last book of the Pentateuch.<\/p>\n But if the law is meant to have a broader application, is it at all\u00a0conceivable\u00a0that it can be extracted from the text? \u00a0I\u2019ve written enough literary papers in college to know that, although it\u2019s possible to use a text as a springboard to many interesting ideas (talk to me about Sweeney Todd<\/em>\u00a0and the range of responses to living in a Fallen world sometime), there\u2019s no guarantee your discovery bears any relation to authorial intent.<\/p>\n I could read Talmudic discussion on the passage, but I\u2019d have no heuristic to tell truth from falsehood. \u00a0In fact, I did a little googling, and found two<\/a>\u00a0sources<\/a>\u00a0that claimed this passage is one of only two laws in the Torah that requires the wrongdoer be maimed. \u00a0That\u2019s interesting and points to some kind of significance, but I have no idea what it could be.<\/p>\n I\u2019d be interested in exegesis from anyone who knows the Torah well, but I\u2019d also be\u00a0interested\u00a0in Christian perspectives on this kind of biblical mystery. \u00a0Reading through the Bible has tended to decrease<\/em>\u00a0the probability I assign to the the likelihood the Christianity is true. \u00a0The Old Testament frequently seems picayune, disjointed, or just plain amoral. \u00a0It\u2019s extremely hard for me to reconcile that with any idea of revelation.<\/p>\n This week, The King and I blog (which is doing a guided reading through the whole King James Bible in a year) finished the Pentateuch. I\u2019ve been keeping up with the readings, and I\u2019m often struck by the strong contrasts between the passages in the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels and\u00a0epistles\u00a0I hear weekly at Sunday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[44,23,147],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epistemologyphilosophy","tag-bible-study","tag-judaism","tag-whence-moral-law"],"yoast_head":"\n